LEROY POWELL – PARANOID

Since leaving his post as the lead guitarist of the .357’s, Shooter Jenning’s backing band, Mr. Powell has been nothing if not prolific. Barely 6 months after Powell’s sophomore release, Angles and Curves, comes a new album and a new direction from Leroy with Paranoid.

I’ve never been shy about my adoration for Leroy’s music (here and here). He wrote my favorite Shooter Jennings songs and his first two solo albums still get regular rotation on my iPod. All this time I’ve described Leroy’s sound with the following, “If you grew up in the 70’s and 80’s with your Daddy listening to country music radio, then you are already familiar with the sound and feel of this album.”

While the country element of Leroy’s “Psychedelic, Southern Rock, Heavy Blues with Country Roots” sound has taken center stage on his first two solo albums, the Southern rock and blues get the spotlight on Paranoid and the results are spectacular. Better than spectacular actually…it’s his best work to date. The standout track on the album has to be Leroy’s take on the Sonny Boy Williamson classic “Good Morning Little School Girl”, which is a Southern rainy night in August type of sexy.

This is an album you need to check out, folks. Seriously. It’s beyond Essential Listening and it’s easily my favorite album of this young year. Leroy, if you read this….this is you in your element. Keep following this path!

8 Comments

I looooooooooooooooove the bassline for ‘Good Morning Little School Girl.’ I became enamoured with it when I heard Jonny Lang’s version and then I saw David Kimbrough(who is, apparently, going by Junior Kimbrough Junior now.) do it live last June and it made me love the song even more to hear somebody do it hill country style.

Those are some cool songs, Back Door Betty is a bit too silly for my taste, but the other two are really great!
I still hope his albums get a proper release and not just downloads. Yeah, call me old-fashioned…

And as an aside: there’s a Shooter best of now called Bad Magick. Are they shitting me? After only three studio albums? And no real rarities either, just three live/AOL tunes of two familiar songs and a Hank Jr cover.

I was, and still am, a huge fan of Shooter’s Electric Rodeo.
It wasn’t until Leroy left that I realized what a powerful influence Leroy had on that album. I’ve seen a half a dozen of Shooters shows, only the first two were with Leroy, the rest were just excuses to go out drinking. He probably left after the crap Shooter called the Wolf.

Actually Leroy led me to ninebullets…….after his sorely missed presence at the Shooter shows I did some Googling to find out what the fuck happened…..and the third search item was ninebullets doing a review on his first album.

Yeah, I don’t understand it either. I was backstage with him, Duwayne Burnside, and a few friends and the band(nothing bad, I’m a good girl who knows ALL musicians are full of shit) and he just told us outright that’s what’s happening. He doesn’t need to though, he thinks he does to get recognition, but he doesn’t. Whatever, I stopped trying to understand the musicians in my region a long time ago. Name change or not, whenever he plays ‘I Got the Dog In Me’ I get excited and hoot and holler and shake my ass.